


The Keystone Army and the Cult of Personality: A Meta on the Galra Empire

by violethowler



Series: VLD Meta Analysis [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Essays, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Meta, Nonfiction, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Season/Series 07 Spoilers, infrastructure of the galra empire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 19:30:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17432138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violethowler/pseuds/violethowler
Summary: The collapse of the empire has been inevitable since the end of Season 2. The audience just didn't realize it.





	The Keystone Army and the Cult of Personality: A Meta on the Galra Empire

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr

While viewers and even a few characters in-universe point to the fight with Lotor in Season 6 as the cause of the empire’s collapse and the near destruction of the Coalition in Season 7, looking back at the previous seasons, it’s not that clear cut. Leaving aside the variables in the Season 6 battle itself, there’s a lot of issues that point to the Galra Empire being structurally unstable and only really holding together this long because Zarkon was in charge. Although the series relies on show-don’t-tell a little too much, the details are usually still there even when the narrative and the script don’t call attention to them. It was never remarked upon, but Season 1 gave us everything we needed to know about the infrastructure of the Galra Empire:

  * The Galra Empire invades, conquers, and colonizes planets.
  * They mine a planet to extract its Quintessence. 
  * The raw Quintessence is taken to secret bases like the one seen in Collection and Extraction
  * Druids use a bastardized version of Altean alchemy taught to them by Haggar to process the raw Quintessence into fuel.
  * What made the Komar so revolutionary to the empire (and horrifying to everyone else), was that it circumvented the entire process and allowed the Druids to harvest the Quintessence of a planet all at once and refine it on site rather than drain the planet over the course of years and shuttle the results to hidden fueling stations across the empire’s territory for refinement.



You’ll notice that while the empire can do the first three on their own regardless of who’s in charge, the last step of the process, along with the Komar itself, cannot be replicated without Haggar and her Druids, or else an Altean alchemist who knows how to refine Quintessence from its raw form into the fuel used by the empire. And given that Lotor and Allura don’t mention finding anything when they search her lab in “Bloodlines”, it’s unlikely that Haggar would just leave her notes on the refinement process lying around Central Command when she abandoned the place. So, while Allura did get all kinds of alchemic knowledge from Oriande, how to process Quintessence into imperial fuel does not appear to be part of that package.

Lotor had grand ideas of solving the empire’s energy problems (the waste of resources on crushing rebellions, the inefficiency of gutting every planet in sight and moving on, etc.), but aside from “gain access to the rift”, he didn’t appear to have any specifics planned long-term. He talked about harvesting Quintessence from the Rift, but he made no mention of how he was going to do it so that the empire’s infrastructure wouldn’t collapse when he eliminated Haggar and the Druids. That’s another way in which he parallels Keith: they both have big goals (stopping Lotor, in Keith’s case, though that goes away while Lotor is allied with Voltron) that they attempt to pursue with single-minded determination to the exclusion of all else.

But even if the events of Season 6 hadn’t happened the way they did and Lotor had remained on the throne, the result would have been the same. With the Druids gone, the empire’s infrastructure crumbles. Lotor hasn’t set up a new system of harvesting and distributing Quintessence, so the Galra now have large quantities of raw Quintessence and no one with the skills to refine it into fuel, and the empire’s fuel supply has now been cut off. Lotor can get Quintessence from the Rift, but without a way to harvest it in large quantities, he can only get as much from the Rift as the two Sincline ships he has can hold. And even if he and Voltron were still on good terms, neither Allura’s wormholes nor the empire’s shipping routes can supply Rift Quintessence to fleets and territories loyal to Lotor fast enough to meet the urgent demand.

Meaning that the fleet commanders and territorial warlords still waiting in line for their shipments of Rift Quintessence start arguing about who deserves to get their supply first, who needs more Quintessence then the other, etc. Commanders start raiding and fighting each other over whatever Druid-processed Quintessence is left. The situation snowballs, and we get the same scenario in Seasons 7 & 8, the only real difference being that Voltron and Lotor are still around and spread way too thin as they scramble to put out all the fires while the empire collapses in on itself, and the Coalition is too busy fending off reprisals from vengeful warlords to assist. By the time Lotor and Voltron figure out a solution, the empire would be a shattered remnant of what it used to be.

We’ve seen throughout the show that even if Lotor had lit the flame of the Kral Zera without the interference of Keith and the Blade, there would still have been sizeable factions of the empire that would rebel in protest at a “half-breed” on the throne. An energy crisis driven by the absence of the Druids just made the existing infighting worse by adding a desperate fight for resources on top of arrogant power grabs.

And it’s really Zarkon’s death that kickstarts the whole chain of events. It’s a sharp contrast in how the Galra reacted to the death of their leader 10,000 years ago compared to now: Even aside from the grief of their destroyed planet, the first time Zarkon died his people mourned him. He and Honerva were given respectful funerals (we presume), and his body was returned to his people for whatever burial customs the Galra had. The second time he died, no one really cared.

Within less than a day of his permanent demise, his underlings were scrambling and jockeying to take the throne for themselves. The only person to really treat his death with anything approaching “hey, our sovereign just died, could we maybe have a day of mourning before we start arguing over who’s next in line for the throne?” was the Archivist. We don’t even get to see what happened to his body, but given what Season 8 showed happens to the souls of people Haggar drains of Quintessence, it’s clear that even his own wife had no qualms about defiling his corpse.

And as I’ve noted in [another meta](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17158478) about Honerva’s arc throughout the series, the more she remembers of her past, the less of a threat the empire becomes. Because it’s worth noticing that the entire chain of events that leads to her husband’s death starts when she summons Lotor to take command while Zarkon is comatose, something that Zarkon explicitly did not approve of. In other words, the entire chain of events started because Haggar started acting independently of Zarkon. It was only when Haggar started pursuing her own agenda that we began to see rival factions emerging within the empire itself. When husband and wife are operating on the same page, working in tandem as a single unit, the empire is a monolithic force. But when they start working independently of each other and pursuing separate agendas, the empire begins to fracture.

I see a lot of Season 7 and 8 meta arguing that the situation with the collapse of the empire and the Coalition is entirely the Paladins’ fault for what happened with Lotor. But looking at the infrastructure and culture of the empire itself, the state of the empire in Seasons 7 and 8 was inevitable from the moment Zarkon bites the dust for good. From the moment Zarkon breathes his last, the clock started ticking on the empire’s demise, and the Paladins’ fight with Lotor in Season 6 only shaved a few months off the countdown at most.

In a way, it reminds me of Operation Cinder from the new Star Wars Expanded Universe. To summarize: Palpatine had put contingencies in place to ensure that in the event of his death, his empire would die with him. In Palpatine’s words: “If an Empire cannot protect its Emperor then that Empire must be deemed a failure. It collapses not only because its central figure is gone, but because it must not be allowed to remain!” While Zarkon didn’t have the foresight for such vengeful contingencies, the result is the same: the empire didn’t just collapse because the emperor was gone, but because the infrastructure of the modern Galra empire was not designed to survive without its ruling couple at the helm.

When Haggar declared that “the empire has fallen” after the Kral Zera, it was not merely for dramatic effect. The Galra Empire is structurally and politically incapable of functioning in the long term without her husband’s iron will to keep power hungry commanders in line or her research and alchemy to maintain its infrastructure, and she knows it. But with Zarkon dead, maintaining the empire is no longer a priority for her. And so, she lets it wither and rot as she spies on her son, the Druids only maintaining the infrastructure because she has not yet ordered them to stop.

 TL;DR: The Galra Empire’s entire infrastructure and cohesion is dependent on Zarkon and Haggar operating in tandem. It’s collapse in Season 7 is not a direct result of Lotor’s removal from power, as characters in-universe assume, but the result of a chain of dominoes triggered by the final battle of Season 2. In other words, the Paladins dealt the fatal blow to the Galra Empire when they defeated Zarkon at the end of the second season, and we’ve been watching it slowly bleed to death ever since.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a reference to the [Keystone Army](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KeystoneArmy) and [Cult of Personality](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CultOfPersonality) tropes on [TVTropes.org](https://tvtropes.org/)


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